The ZONE: January 2025

The Book Lovers

Steve Aylett

Snow paperback £9.99

***** (5 stars) review by Tony Lee

I have been a fan of Steve Aylett since the 1990s, and always loved re-reading his books, and comics. His writing combines wisdom and humour, but with a rare intelligence that never turns pretentious, as creativity in Aylett’s stories is a thought-provoking challenge. Aylett’s impact on genre literature appears wildly undervalued by most book critics, and the reading public. To me, Aylett is the post-modern equivalent of a Ray Bradbury, with practically unique merits in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Relevance to Bradbury is especially notable here as THE BOOK LOVERS plays like a thematic prequel to classic dystopia Fahrenheit 451 (1953), upgraded eloquently for the 21st century. Clearly, Aylett doesn’t have melancholy attitudes like the grandfatherly Bradbury, or nostalgic attachments to childhood dreams. Instead, with astonishingly witty approaches to narrative-framing conventions, and significantly economical character-building tropes, Aylett’s inspired by the likes of literary stylist Jorge Luis Borges. Playful channelling of tropes from Borges is particularly evident when Aylett’s deep-reading characters discuss entirely invented and yet influential books as if they’re reviewing novels or laudable stories from other writers.

Despite frequently effervescent prose, the density of this work often feels like a far larger book “with pages like geological layers”. With Aylett’s humility here, an apparently ‘cult’ author in this fictional-English realm declares: “the world is not a golem for us to write a meaning upon” and later, he admits “you don’t want an idea burning a hole in the page.” The cream of concrete solidity with DNA scale info prompts absurd thoughts like tearing any page from this book to plant in the ground, and then expecting it to sprout instantly, as Jack’s magic beanstalk. THE BOOK LOVERS delivers metaphors with irony baked in, yet fearlessly deploys puns dusted for prints by forensic sarcasm. “A world that needs so many inspirational slogans to get through it is probably defective.”

Charmingly, the quasi-steampunk subgenre explored in these pages offers far more than merely a convenient marketing label that this book wears much like a fashion statement. Dream-girl Sophie, an improbable heiress and, reportedly, a kidnapping victim, is also a heroine with fabulous “cherry sherbet chemistry”, seeming to possess an enviable charisma with enough personable appeal to easily win over full hearts and open minds. Top police officer on this increasingly weird case, D.I. Nightjar investigates and interviews suspects and holds “strangers to account in a land where precision is a liability and continuity an embarrassment”.

Fictional options here are like opinions. Everyone’s got some, if not all of them. A thinly shrouded commentary on cancel culture and climate crisis? Check. The key text for this puzzler might be anarchist bible, Truth’s Flying Visit, a cult-book by the Rook, claiming “we strive to individuate a mistake so as not to acknowledge the universal error”. In our cultural dystopia since the millennium, the quality of Aylett’s best work has a few rivals (Jeff Noon, Rudy Rucker, OK... William Gibson, maybe?) but no equals. Aylett might be the most sublimely conceptual author in any SF blend. He’s certainly the most quotable writer of this century, so far. Almost endlessly repeatable, in fact, as it would be far too easy to fill up column-metres of reviews with favourite lines from THE BOOK LOVERS. I hope, with this latest adventure, Aylett will inspire other writers to follow his leading authorial role, upping the ante for the highest practising ambition in English literature.